Papers

Despite the central importance of research papers to scientific progress, they can be difficult to read. Comprehension is often stymied when the information needed to understand a passage resides somewhere else: in another section, or in another paper. In this work, we envision how interfaces can bring definitions of technical terms and symbols to readers when and where they need them most. We introduce ScholarPhi, an augmented reading interface with four novel features: (1) tooltips that surface position-sensitive definitions from elsewhere in a paper, (2) a filter over the paper that "declutters" it to reveal how the term or symbol is used across the paper, (3) automatic equation diagrams that expose multiple definitions in parallel, and (4) an automatically generated glossary of important terms and symbols. A usability study showed that the tool helps researchers of all experience levels read papers. Furthermore, researchers were eager to have ScholarPhi's definitions available to support their everyday reading.

Increasingly, organizations are pairing humans with AI systems to improve decision-making and reducing costs. Proponents of human-centered AI argue that team performance can even further improve when the AI model explains its recommendations. However, a careful analysis of existing literature reveals that prior studies observed improvements due to explanations only when the AI, alone, outperformed both the human and the best human-AI team. This raises an important question: can explanations lead to complementary performance, i.e., with accuracy higher than both the human and the AI working alone? We address this question by devising comprehensive studies on human-AI teaming, where participants solve a task with help from an AI system without explanations and from one with varying types of AI explanation support. We carefully controlled to ensure comparable human and AI accuracy across experiments on three NLP datasets (two for sentiment analysis and one for question answering). While we found complementary improvements from AI augmentation, they were not increased by state-of-the-art explanations compared to simpler strategies, such as displaying the AI's confidence. We show that explanations increase the chance that humans will accept the AI's recommendation regardless of whether the AI is correct. While this clarifies the gains in team performance from explanations in prior work, it poses new challenges for human-centered AI: how can we best design systems to produce complementary performance? Can we develop explanatory approaches that help humans decide whether and when to trust AI input?

The advent of neural-networks in NLP brought with it substantial improvements in supervised relation extraction. However, obtaining a sufficient quantity of training data remains a key challenge. In this work we propose a process for bootstrapping training datasets which can be performed quickly by non-NLP-experts. We take advantage of search engines over syntactic-graphs (Such as Shlain et al. (2020)) which expose a friendly by-example syntax. We use these to obtain positive examples by searching for sentences that are syntactically similar to user input examples. We apply this technique to relations from TACRED and DocRED and show that the resulting models are competitive with models trained on manually annotated data and on data obtained from distant supervision. The models also outperform models trained using NLG data augmentation techniques. Extending the search-based approach with the NLG method further improves the results.

Multilingual pretrained language models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot crosslingual transfer capabilities. Such transfer emerges by fine-tuning on a task of interest in one language and evaluating on a distinct language, not seen during the fine-tuning. Despite promising results, we still lack a proper understanding of the source of this transfer. Using a novel layer ablation technique and analyses of the model’s internal representations, we show that multilingual BERT, a popular multilingual language model, can be viewed as the stacking of two sub-networks: a multilingual encoder followed by a taskspecific language-agnostic predictor. While the encoder is crucial for cross-lingual transfer and remains mostly unchanged during finetuning, the task predictor has little importance on the transfer and can be reinitialized during fine-tuning. We present extensive experiments with three distinct tasks, seventeen typologically diverse languages and multiple domains to support our hypothesis.

Trust is a central component of the interaction between people and AI, in that 'incorrect' levels of trust may cause misuse, abuse or disuse of the technology. But what, precisely, is the nature of trust in AI? What are the prerequisites and goals of the cognitive mechanism of trust, and how can we cause these prerequisites and goals, or assess whether they are being satisfied in a given interaction? This work aims to answer these questions. We discuss a model of trust inspired by, but not identical to, sociology's interpersonal trust (i.e., trust between people). This model rests on two key properties of the vulnerability of the user and the ability to anticipate the impact of the AI model's decisions. We incorporate a formalization of 'contractual trust', such that trust between a user and an AI is trust that some implicit or explicit contract will hold, and a formalization of 'trustworthiness' (which detaches from the notion of trustworthiness in sociology), and with it concepts of 'warranted' and 'unwarranted' trust. We then present the possible causes of warranted trust as intrinsic reasoning and extrinsic behavior, and discuss how to design trustworthy AI, how to evaluate whether trust has manifested, and whether it is warranted. Finally, we elucidate the connection between trust and XAI using our formalization.

We present the ARC-DA dataset, a direct-answer (“open response”, “freeform”) version of the ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) multiple-choice dataset. While ARC has been influential in the community, its multiple-choice format is unrepresentative of real-world questions, and multiple choice formats can be particularly susceptible to artifacts. The ARCDA dataset addresses these concerns by converting questions to direct-answer format using a combination of crowdsourcing and expert review. The resulting dataset contains 2985 questions with a total of 8436 valid answers (questions typically have more than one valid answer). ARC-DA is one of the first DA datasets of natural questions that often require reasoning, and where appropriate question decompositions are not evident from the questions themselves. We describe the conversion approach taken, appropriate evaluation metrics, and several strong models. Although high, the best scores (81% GENIE, 61.4% F1, 63.2% ROUGE-L) still leave considerable room for improvement. In addition, the dataset provides a natural setting for new research on explanation, as many questions require reasoning to construct answers. We hope the dataset spurs further advances in complex questionanswering by the community.

Recent years have brought about a renewed interest in commonsense representation and reasoning in the field of natural language understanding. The development of new commonsense knowledge graphs (CSKG) has been central to these advances as their diverse facts can be used and referenced by machine learning models for tackling new and challenging tasks. At the same time, there remain questions about the quality and coverage of these resources due to the massive scale required to comprehensively encompass general commonsense knowledge. In this work, we posit that manually constructed CSKGs will never achieve the coverage necessary to be applicable in all situations encountered by NLP agents. Therefore, we propose a new evaluation framework for testing the utility of KGs based on how effectively implicit knowledge representations can be learned from them. With this new goal, we propose ATOMIC 2020, a new CSKG of general-purpose commonsense knowledge containing knowledge that is not readily available in pretrained language models. We evaluate its properties in comparison with other leading CSKGs, performing the first large-scale pairwise study of commonsense knowledge resources. Next, we show that ATOMIC 2020 is better suited for training knowledge models that can generate accurate, representative knowledge for new, unseen entities and events. Finally, through human evaluation, we show that the few-shot performance of GPT-3 (175B parameters), while impressive, remains ~12 absolute points lower than a BART-based knowledge model trained on ATOMIC 2020 despite using over 430x fewer parameters.

Understanding narratives requires reasoning about implicit world knowledge related to the causes, effects, and states of situations described in text. At the core of this challenge is how to access contextually relevant knowledge on demand and reason over it. In this paper, we present initial studies toward zero-shot commonsense question answering by formulating the task as inference over dynamically generated commonsense knowledge graphs. In contrast to previous studies for knowledge integration that rely on retrieval of existing knowledge from static knowledge graphs, our study requires commonsense knowledge integration where contextually relevant knowledge is often not present in existing knowledge bases. Therefore, we present a novel approach that generates contextually-relevant symbolic knowledge structures on demand using generative neural commonsense knowledge models. Empirical results on two datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our neuro-symbolic approach for dynamically constructing knowledge graphs for reasoning. Our approach achieves significant performance boosts over pretrained language models and vanilla knowledge models, all while providing interpretable reasoning paths for its predictions.

The black-box nature of neural models has motivated a line of research that aims to generate natural language rationales to explain why a model made certain predictions. Such rationale generation models, to date, have been trained on dataset-specific crowdsourced rationales, but this approach is costly and is not generalizable to new tasks and domains. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which neural models can reason about natural language rationales that explain model predictions, relying only on distant supervision with no additional annotation cost for human-written rationales. We investigate multiple ways to automatically generate rationales using pre-trained language models, neural knowledge models, and distant supervision from related tasks, and train generative models capable of composing explanatory rationales for unseen instances. We demonstrate our approach on the defeasible inference task, a nonmonotonic reasoning task in which an inference may be strengthened or weakened when new information (an update) is introduced. Our model shows promises at generating post-hoc rationales explaining why an inference is more or less likely given the additional information, however, it mostly generates trivial rationales reflecting the fundamental limitations of neural language models. Conversely, the more realistic setup of jointly predicting the update or its type and generating rationale is more challenging, suggesting an important future direction.